My work and travel over the past few years have made me spend a lot of time on the road: commuting to and from different jobs and classes, driving between cities to see family and friends, etc. Many Americans spend a great deal of time commuting to and from work on a daily basis, and some of the recent research on happiness (discussed in countless books such as Happiness: Lessons from a New Science and Happiness: Unlocking the Mysteries of Psychological Wealth) indicates that a long daily commute is one of the surest paths to a stressful and unhappy life.
Anyone who has been stuck in standstill traffic on the Dan Ryan Expressway in Chicago (to give one example) will probably intuitively understand the truth behind such research findings. But many of us have no choice but to drive a great deal for work - and for home-owning commuters in many areas, the collapse in home prices in recent years has made it impractical to sell one's house to move closer to one's workplace.
But this is one area in which approaching life as a self-educator can make a person more happy and fulfilled. To the self-educator, the day-to-day "grind" of commuting, work, waiting, and errands can be at least partially transformed into a set of opportunities for learning and growth. Our daily schedules, which often seem so packed and overfilled with tasks and obligations, usually contain "hidden moments"* - or even hidden hours - that we are accustomed to wasting, but that can be put to work in the service of learning, goals, and growth.
Here are a few ways in which I have put my commute to use in the past or hope to put it to use in the future. If any of these ideas appeal to you, I encourage you to think about how you can modify it to suit your own tastes, interests, and circumstances.
-Visit your local public library and browse the audio book collection. Skip the latest bestsellers and challenge yourself with something you know will be valuable and cause you to grow and broaden your mind: a classic work of literature or a book of history, for example. Listen to these on the road. (Audio books I've listened to this year: James Joyce, Dubliners; Matthew Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft; Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged; Joseph Ellis, Founding Brothers; Bernard Lewis, The Crisis of Islam; Bob Woodward, State of Denial). Also, many libraries have some sort of interlibrary loan system that you can use to borrow audio CDs (as well as books and other materials) from libraries around your region. (See also: The case for reading good books and Self-education and language learning).
-Find out what your local NPR news station is, and listen to it. NPR has five minute news summaries every hour, and many of their daily programs offer incredibly valuable and in-depth interviews, commentaries, and features. Nothing else on the radio can compare. NPR programs regularly interview and profile people of all political persuasions, and the vast majority of NPR programming consists of informed debate and informative reporting, not opinion pieces.
-If you have an auxiliary audio jack with which you can attach an iPod, smartphone, or other mp3 player to your car stereo, download high-quality podcasts or audio files to your mp3 player and create a playlist to listen to in the car. Great podcasts with high educational value are put out by NPR, PBS, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other websites and media outlets. (Browse the iTunes Store's podcast collection here - nearly all podcasts are free.)
-Consider subscribing to audio versions of high-quality, educational magazines and newspapers. You can arrange to have these automatically downloaded to your digital audio player every morning in time for your commute. I particularly recommend the Economist, every article of which is made available each week in podcast/audio format for subscribers. Regularly reading the Economist over a period of years is, in my opinion, the single best way to gain a broad knowledge of current events around the world. And the Economist is not, its title notwithstanding, primarily a business magazine; its pages include news from around the world, in-depth special reports about a wide range of topics, business and economics news, science news, book reviews, and more.
Audible.com also offers audio subscriptions to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, the U.S.'s top two newspapers. The Times is better for in-depth investigative reporting about politics and international affairs, and its opinion pages are mostly liberal; the Journal has a business and finance focus, and its opinion pages are mostly conservative.
Showing posts with label audio. Show all posts
Showing posts with label audio. Show all posts
Monday, July 5, 2010
Thursday, July 9, 2009
On language learning textbooks
Over the years, I've accumulated a decent library of world language textbooks and readers. Even those I do not get around to studying usually yield some benefit - I can get a feel for the sound and structure of each language with only a few hours of reading, and such kernels of knowledge can often serve as bridges and conversation-starters with native speakers. And then there is the physical presence of the books: the diversity of the languages represented is a reminder of all the things I hope to study and places I hope to travel.
I have also learned something from the texts about the many ways foreign languages can be taught and how teaching methods have changed over time. The improvement in recording technologies has revolutionized language learning; it is difficult to imagine, but many earlier students of world languages had to study without ever hearing their target language spoken. Today, the primary (and, in my experience, most effective) method of instruction is to have the student listen to and memorize conversations carried on by native speakers in various contexts (the train station, the post office, the dinner table, etc.). Grammar is learned intuitively; one comes to understand the workings of the past tense by hearing a voice actor discuss his or her day at work. It’s a long way from the older methods, still used in the most widely disseminated Latin and Greek textbooks (Wheelock’s and Mastronarde’s), of memorizing paradigm after paradigm and carrying out drill after drill.
Language textbooks are invariably infused with knowledge of the cultures where the language is spoken. For instance, Latin is learned through readings about the orations of senators and the deeds of heroes and gods; Norwegian is learned by listening in on the conversation of tourists in Oslo who are admiring the sculptures in the Frognerparken; and Italian is learned through texts about the history of coffee or the many courses of an Italian dinner. Most dialogues in contemporary language textbooks have settings - some are universal, but many are specific to a particular time and place. It’s hard to imagine an elementary Russian textbook that does not teach the reader how to ask for directions to Red Square.
The experience of learning how to find one’s way around the Kremlin, and “asking” directions during the lulls on the audio track provided for that purpose, with soft voices and the sound of traffic in the background to add authenticity, is qualitatively different from the experience of reading about Red Square in a history book or travel guide. In secondhand accounts, the reader is one more step removed from the experience of physically being in Moscow. The language learner, however, can to some extent simulate that experience. And if one’s attitude when reading secondhand accounts of another place’s history and culture is one of looking upon a culture from “above,” one’s attitude as a language learner is much more humble. Even the cows of ancient Greece understand Attic Greek better than we ever will, someone once quipped. There is some truth to that. The student of languages is a student in the fullest sense of the word; his highest aspiration is to speak a language as well as a native speaker - any native speaker, regardless of age or station. He may believe, consciously or not, that there individuals in his home culture with whom he has nothing to discuss and from whom he has nothing to learn - but abroad he is stripped of that elitist attitude, because everyone reads, writes, and speaks better than him.
I continue to learn a lot and derive a great deal of pleasure from my library of language textbooks, and I’ve become a collector almost by accident; the collection is a byproduct of two of the things I love most: languages and books. By letting go of the dream of ever mastering all the languages represented in my collection, I have given myself a freer hand to purchase the old Russian text with “Printed in the Soviet Union” stamped in red ink on the frontispiece, and the grossly outdated handbook of Japanese grammar written to assist American servicepeople in the postwar occupation of Japan. Even if these are all but useless as instruments of language study, they serve a different purpose by providing that pleasure of owning something rare that is the province and privilege of the collector.
I have also learned something from the texts about the many ways foreign languages can be taught and how teaching methods have changed over time. The improvement in recording technologies has revolutionized language learning; it is difficult to imagine, but many earlier students of world languages had to study without ever hearing their target language spoken. Today, the primary (and, in my experience, most effective) method of instruction is to have the student listen to and memorize conversations carried on by native speakers in various contexts (the train station, the post office, the dinner table, etc.). Grammar is learned intuitively; one comes to understand the workings of the past tense by hearing a voice actor discuss his or her day at work. It’s a long way from the older methods, still used in the most widely disseminated Latin and Greek textbooks (Wheelock’s and Mastronarde’s), of memorizing paradigm after paradigm and carrying out drill after drill.
Language textbooks are invariably infused with knowledge of the cultures where the language is spoken. For instance, Latin is learned through readings about the orations of senators and the deeds of heroes and gods; Norwegian is learned by listening in on the conversation of tourists in Oslo who are admiring the sculptures in the Frognerparken; and Italian is learned through texts about the history of coffee or the many courses of an Italian dinner. Most dialogues in contemporary language textbooks have settings - some are universal, but many are specific to a particular time and place. It’s hard to imagine an elementary Russian textbook that does not teach the reader how to ask for directions to Red Square.
The experience of learning how to find one’s way around the Kremlin, and “asking” directions during the lulls on the audio track provided for that purpose, with soft voices and the sound of traffic in the background to add authenticity, is qualitatively different from the experience of reading about Red Square in a history book or travel guide. In secondhand accounts, the reader is one more step removed from the experience of physically being in Moscow. The language learner, however, can to some extent simulate that experience. And if one’s attitude when reading secondhand accounts of another place’s history and culture is one of looking upon a culture from “above,” one’s attitude as a language learner is much more humble. Even the cows of ancient Greece understand Attic Greek better than we ever will, someone once quipped. There is some truth to that. The student of languages is a student in the fullest sense of the word; his highest aspiration is to speak a language as well as a native speaker - any native speaker, regardless of age or station. He may believe, consciously or not, that there individuals in his home culture with whom he has nothing to discuss and from whom he has nothing to learn - but abroad he is stripped of that elitist attitude, because everyone reads, writes, and speaks better than him.
I continue to learn a lot and derive a great deal of pleasure from my library of language textbooks, and I’ve become a collector almost by accident; the collection is a byproduct of two of the things I love most: languages and books. By letting go of the dream of ever mastering all the languages represented in my collection, I have given myself a freer hand to purchase the old Russian text with “Printed in the Soviet Union” stamped in red ink on the frontispiece, and the grossly outdated handbook of Japanese grammar written to assist American servicepeople in the postwar occupation of Japan. Even if these are all but useless as instruments of language study, they serve a different purpose by providing that pleasure of owning something rare that is the province and privilege of the collector.
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